Felix found himself lying in a corridor lit by a line of white flickering bulbs on the roof. The walls were made of dark and cold bricks, while a buzzing sound was coming from down under. A girl was at his feet, wearing a school uniform made of a red skirt and a white shirt, with the sleeves rolled at the elbow.

“Are you all right?”, she said, grasping his shaking hand to pull him up. It wasn’t what he expected to see as the first person he met, and he even felt that it wasn’t a completely new face, but he couldn’t remember the person to which it belonged.

“Water”, he muttered, “I need water”. The girl ran in the opposite direction and returned with a canteen with the lid already open. Felix ripped it off from her hands and he started to chug, making water splash on his face. It was sure one of the best feelings he experienced.

“You must be still in shock”, she said, “Don’t worry, come with me. We’re all downstairs”. Felix nodded, as he was still dizzy. She led him down the corridor. When they went down the ramp of stairs, she banged her forehead against the metal roof, making it ring. “Ouch!”, she said, caressing her forehead, “That’s the third time today”. That was one of the few upsides of being short again. After passing through a door, they arrived in a small room, with four bunk beds with no mattresses, a plastic table with four chairs, a stove, and a digital clock stuck at midnight.

“So, here he is”, said a guy. His head was shaved, and he was wearing on his shoulders the fur of one of the wolves he had the luck to meet. Even when seated his head was nearly touching the low ceiling, “That’s some girly hair you got”;

He didn’t have the will to banter with a teenager, so he moved towards the bed where the girl was watching over a sleeping person.

“Don’t listen to him”, said the girl, “He’s stupid and very rude”;

“I’m just saying what I think”, She picked the wet cloth from the sleeping person's forehead and squeezed it in a bucket, “I like his hairstyle”, she said, “It’s cute”. The tall guy propped his feet on the table, “If it were for me”, he said, “I’d have left you to die outside. It was too dangerous to open the hatch again”;

“Nobody cares about what you think”, said Felix. His thick eyebrows sunk, making his skin wrinkle, and the veins of his temples bulge even more, “I was trying to say that you should thank her”;

“It was my duty”, she said, putting again the wet cloth on the ill person. She came towards him, offering her hand, “My name’s Alice”;

“Felix”. He gazed past Alice to the person on the bed, whose body started to shake in convulsions, “Who is he?”;

“He’s Colin”, she said, and turned towards him, “We’ve been friends since childhood. He went looking for water, and when he came back he collapsed in my hands. He has never felt better since”.

In his sleep, a green liquid poured from his mouth into the bucket at the side of the bed. The giant guy turned towards him, “That thing is nasty”, he said, “If you drink it, it’ll poison you”;

“I already know that”;

“Poor guy”, the Giant continued, “He doesn’t have much more to live if that thing is inside his bowels. He’s suffering too much, Alice, and you know it”. There wasn’t even much to talk about: that person was infected, and he was right.

“Never”, she said, and crossed her arms, “You’ll have to kill me first”;

“It’s your friend, not mine, if you’re happy with him suffering, then go with it”;

“Do you think it’s easy?”, she kneeled to Colin’s bed again, “I can’t give up. There must be a cure. If it was lethal, he’d be already dead”. She cleaned Colin’s mouth with a napkin and then turned towards Felix. This wasn’t the best moment to talk her about it.

“Have a seat”, she said, “I’ll prepare you something”;

“Yeah”, said the Giant, “It’s like someone glued you there”. What a brat. He sat on furthest chair from him. On the right side, there was an induction stove, with an opened tin can on it and a tea pot.

“Where does water and electricity come from?”, said Felix;

“There must be a tank beyond the wall”, said Alice, “And there are some solar panels outside; you must have not seen them”;

“There was someone here before us”, said the Giant, “The cables here are kind of new”.

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Alice poured the red soup into a bowl and put a spoon inside.

Those people weren’t much different than the ones of five hundred years of the past, and they even spoke the same language, and neither seemed dangerous. He took a spoonful of the soup. After all the small talk, it was time to talk about important matters: trying to understand what happened to the world in five hundred years.

“What are you doing here?”, he said.

“I don’t know”, said Alice, “Me and Colin woke up here, and we can’t remember anything”, said Alice. “Me too”, said the Giant, “What about you?”. This wasn’t the answer he hoped to receive.

“I was in a cap-”. He coughed;

“In a caps…”, he coughed again until tears formed in his eyes. What was happening?

“Are you all right?”, said Alice. No, he wasn’t.

“We are five hun…”. His throat started to burn. This was absurd. He opened his mouth to scream that he died, that his consciousness had been implanted into a new body, and that they were five hundred years in the future, but the only thing he accomplished to do was looking like a nutcase. Alice and the Giant exchanged a puzzled look, as they watched him twist his tongue trying to talk.

“I’m a cadet of an Academy”, he said, at last, “Just a cadet”, and he sighed. Well, he was, once.

“Man, you’re really weird”, he said, “I knew all army guys were nuts. Good riddance I didn’t listen to those recruiters at the mall”;

“Have you ever died?”;

“What the hell? No!”. Felix’s head turned toward Alice, waiting for an answer.

“I would have remembered”, she said.

Felix took a breath, “What year are we-”. His vocal cords blocked themselves again, and he realized that it wasn’t something that happened by chance: it was like a jolt that paralyzed his larynx muscles every time that he tried to talk about the past or his reincarnation.

“Has the Enemy attacked America yet?”;

“Why are you asking us?”, said the Giant, “You’re in the army, you should know these things much better than us”;

“I really need to know if you know it”;

“No”, said Alice, “They make their arrivals pretty clear”. And they made a very good job at that in the day they wiped out his Academy.

Now he understood everything: they must have been reincarnated like him, but their memories have been erased, so now they acted like teenagers. In fact, there was no way that guy and the girl could have not been conscripted at some time. But why he retained his memories? The only thing that he was sure was that he won’t find much about this world from them.

“How did you survive out there? It’s a pretty harsh environment”;

“What do you mean, girly hair? That we’re not capable of surviving just because we aren’t part of your stupid Academy? We managed better than you”, his eyebrows connected in a single unibrow;

“He doesn’t mean that”, said Alice, “We should collaborate instead of insulting each other”;

“Whatever” said the Giant;

“I’ll tell you how we arrived here, from beginning to end”, she said, “At first it was me and Colin. We woke up at some distance, but we found each other quickly. We stopped under a cliff: I was preparing the shelter for the night and arranging rocks to help us having some condensation, while him”, she turned towards Colin, sighing, “I should have never let him go alone, but he wanted so much to be useful. He came back at dusk, when I was doubting he was going to be back at all. I didn’t sleep at all that night, and I asked if he ate or drank something, but he only muttered something about bugs. Maybe the flies were tormenting him, in fact they were all around him. I had never saw something like this: they were landing on the white of his eyes, trying to crawl inside his nostrils, and his ears”, she shook her head, “It was just horrible”.

“When did the two of you meet?”;

“It’s my time to talk, isn’t it?”, said the Giant, “Well, when I woke up I was circled by a pack of those bastard wolves. Listen, the secret is to grab their jaws and pull them apart, that’s their weak spot, but it took some time to get it”, he showed a bite mark on his forearm, on a stitched strip between the long hairs, “And there’s another I can’t show you. But you kill two or three of them and they understand you’re someone that shouldn’t be messed with”, he turned towards Alice, “I found those two during the night, when I heard some howls near a cliff. When I arrived there, I killed some others”.

“Colin had matches with him”, said Alice, “We wouldn’t have survived as long for him to arrive without them. We travelled together in the wrong direction, until in the afternoon a message told us to look for this place. Luckily we had been on the right track for the whole time.”, she turned towards the Giant, “I had to carry Colin, but it wasn’t much of a hassle”;

“Why didn’t you carry him?”, said Felix;

“I didn’t believe he was going to survive the journey”, he shrugged, “When we were walking, I keep telling myself every five minutes that that was the moment, but it has been two days and he’s still there. I have to admit he’s a tough bastard”.

Colin’s shriek froze Felix in his place. His eyes were wide open, glaring at him; they had a pale green color instead of white. He continued to scream in his direction, thrashing his body, the muscles and the veins were bulging, and blood poured from his lips.

“Colin! Stop!”, Alice ran towards the bed, but when she grabbed one arm, he pushed her back with the other. “We have to keep him steady!”, said Felix, “Or he'll hurt himself”. The Giant pinned his body on the bed, gritting his teeth, and sweat was running from his temples, “He’s giving a damn fight here, move up!”;

Felix grabbed his right arm, but it was impossible to hold on it. Colin’s bony hand was clawing at the metal of the bedpost, then Felix did the same with his ankle, while Alice did the same on the other side. He continued to thrash his body, moving the bed, and Alice had to push his head to the side to avoid him from choking in his liquid. He gasped, and his eyes rolled backwards, showing only the white part, and he fell into unconsciousness again.

The Giant cleaned his sweat from the forehead, “When you lose control of your muscles you’re much stronger”, he said, and sighed, “That was harder than I thought”. Even if he went through worse times, it was never a pleasant experience.

Alice raised Colin shirt. Something was crawling under his skin. “That’s not normal”, said the Giant. There was no way he could be saved. He had to kill him, or they will be all doomed.